The word pain shows up early in the Bible, in chapter 3 of the book of Genesis:
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
I’ve often wondered why God instituted pain in the lives of people. Personally I believe it was and still is His way of protecting us. For instance if we touch something hot the initial pain causes us to remove our hands from the heat source. Imagine if we did not feel any pain. Our hand will never detract from the flame and will just burn us completely.
Pain allows us to realize something is not right and needs to be changed. Without pain we become lepers. Leprosy is a disease that affects the nerves. When our nerves cannot feel pain it fails to send messages to our brain. Our clueless brain is unable to inform the rest of the body how to respond properly. The result is we accidentally hurt/lose our toes and fingers.
Pain therefore signals the brain that triggers our body’s immune system to set up our body’s defenses. This is just as true for our spiritual lives. Pain signals our soul which then triggers our spirits to start praying. Prayer functions much like our immune system - it causes all of God's forces to start working in defense of our lives.
As the people of God we need to be sensitive to the pain that affects not just ourselves but the people around us. When we become sensitive to pain we are able to promptly respond with prayer. We need to be careful not to drown pain from our lives, lest we become spiritual lepers.
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